Leveraging auxiliary information on marginal distributions in nonignorable models for item and unit nonresponse

Abstract

Often, government agencies and survey organizations know the population counts or percentages for some of the variables in a survey. These may be available from auxiliary sources, for example administrative databases or other high-quality surveys. We present and illustrate a model-based framework for leveraging such auxiliary marginal information when handling unit and item nonresponse. We show how one can use the margins to specify different missingness mechanisms for each type of nonresponse. We use the framework to impute missing values in voter turnout in a subset of data from the US Current Population Survey. In doing so, we examine the sensitivity of results to different assumptions about the unit and item nonresponse.